How To Listen: The Most Underrated Leadership Hack In the 21st Century with Oscar Trimboli

Are you feeling too distracted to pay attention? Does listening make your brain hurt? In a world full of noise and distraction - listening is the biggest leadership hack in today’s world. In this episode we crack the code on how to deeply listen, how to listen to what is unsaid, and the tons of specific hacks and tactics you can use to take your listening to the next level with our guest Oscar Trimboli.Oscar Trimboli is on a quest to create 100 million Deep Listeners in the world. He is an author, Host of the Apple Award winning podcast--Deep Listening and a sought-after keynote speaker. He consults for organizations including Cisco, Google, HSBC, and many others. He is the author of the best selling works Breakthroughs: How to confront assumptions and Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words.If you can listen, you can change the worldThe mission of creating 100 million listeners If you can achieve your goal in your lifetime it’s not ambitious enoughWe are struggling as individuals and the world is struggling - we are distracted, we can’t focus, we are overwhelmed86% of people struggle with distraction todayWe spent the 20th-century learning how to speak, the leadership hack for the 21st century is learning how to listenThe more senior you are, the more you lead, the more time you spend listeningLess than 2% of people have been trained how to listenHow do you teach your kids how to listen? How do you teach your employees how to listen?We listen in 2 dimensions - we listen in black and white right now - but we can listen in more colors, and we can listen more deeply.Listen to someone on TV who you fiercely disagree with. What’s the difference between hearing vs listening? What assumptions and prejudices do you hold?How do you become aware of your listening blind spots?Spend 30 minutes listening to someone who you fiercely disagree with, and you will start to really understand your listening blind spots.We spend a huge chunk of our lives screaming to be noticed. Hearing = here sounds. Listening = make sense of what you hear. The difference between hearing and listening is the action you take. Deep listening is helping the person who is speaking make sense of what they’re saying Three key lessons from neuroscience about listeningWe can listen so much faster than we can speak, it creates a massive opportunity for us to get distractedYou must be an “empty vessel” to focus on someone else and actually listen to them 3 Quick tips to center yourself in a conversationBefore you even think about listening to the speaker, you have to be ready to listen. When somebody says something, treat silence at the end of what they say like it’s another word. 3 Phrases to continue any conversationIn our rush to fill the silence, we miss out on quite a lot. When you use phrases like “tell me more” you give someone the opportunity to align their thoughts more clearly, think through the idea, and figure out the most important themes and ideas to shine through in the conversation. How many breakthroughs are you missing in your organization just because you’re not listening? 5 Levels of Listening“You’ve heard something in 25 minutes that we couldn’t hear in 3 months"A powerful question that can solve insurmountable business problems: Who are you not listening to right now?Sometimes the people you really need to listen to aren’t in the room. The only way to get someone to see the gap between where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow is by ASKING THEM A QUESTION, not by telling them. The magic happens when you put your attention on other people instead of just putting it on yourself.If the question if about YOU and YOUR understanding, it’s not as powerful as a question helping THEM improve THEIR understanding. Homework: Listen to something you deeply disagree with for 30 minutes. 

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